Merriment is a festive ClassicPress theme made to celebrate Christmas. It pairs a snowy header image and a cozy holly background with evergreen, holly red and candlelight gold accents, and it is responsive and mobile ready. It’s great for any blogger who wants to bring some holiday cheer to their site.

Merriment is a parent theme. What this means is that to customize it, you should be creating a child theme. All you need to know is that it is a solid, yet flexible starting point for any holiday blog.

Features

Merriment is built on the rock-solid Backdrop Framework, so it provides a great starting point with many useful features.

• A custom header image with the site title over it, plus a custom background.
• Layouts that let you choose between a left sidebar, a right sidebar, or no sidebar.
• A primary menu with dropdowns on larger screens, and a Menu button at the bottom left on small screens.
• A social menu in the footer with icons for common sites.
• Primary and Footer widget areas.
• Threaded comments that keep conversations easy to follow.
• A Christmas palette with Fira Sans headings, Merriweather text, and dates in Tangerine.
• Translation ready, so your site can be presented in any language.

For step-by-step guides, read the Merriment documentation.

Child themes

Since Merriment is a parent theme, you'll want to create a child theme if you plan on making any customizations. Don't know how to make a child theme? It's relatively simple. Just follow the below steps.

• Create a theme folder in your /wp-content/themes directory called merriment-child.
• Then, create a style.css file within your theme folder.
• At the top of your style.css file, add the below information.

/**
 * Theme Name: Merriment Child
 * Theme URI: http://link-to-your-site.com
 * Description: Describe what your theme should be like.
 * Version: 0.1
 * Author: Your Name
 * Author URI: http://link-to-your-site.com
 * Tags: Add, Whatever, Tags, You, Want
 * Text Domain: merriment-child
 * Template: merriment
 */

Template must match the parent theme’s folder name, merriment. From this point, you simply need to start adding your own styles. The Merriment parent theme styles will automatically be loaded for you.